Absolutely. I'm certainly not trying to advocate being a penny-pincher. Growing a company requires spending money, intelligently.
This is just a quick brain hack that helps us place value on what seems like a small expense once it all becomes "numbers".
A decent rule of thumb is usually "would you spend it if it was your own money" - most people aren't going to go buy $20,000 couches for the office, but they might buy an $800 couch or a $150 Craigslist special. Feel free to ignore this if you are Larry Ellison :)
Actually, there have been a lot of times where I'd spend more of my own money (and have) than I would startup money -- e.g. I'll bring in my personal game systems but wouldn't pay for them with company money, let people use my personal car, etc. That's a rational decision for a founder, especially since behaving that way might encourage others to be cost-conscious (you wouldn't expect employees to do the same thing, but they might be willing to try a software load balancer instead of a $50k F5 if you have the right culture, or at the very least to get the best pricing and terms possible from vendors)
Yeah I used to piss off the CFO a couple of jobs ago by spending entirely modest amounts of money to make the engineers happy/productive and explaining "this is something where I would spend my own money to do this, and in fact I did, if you don't want to cut me a reimbursement check then don't."
It's always kind of crazy to see finance people bitch about buying dinner or espressos for the team when they're working late.
But sometimes the company ends up with a tightass CFO like that after the founder buys a $20k couch, so there we go!
$10k/mo for the next 5 years is a lot less painful for a seed stage startup than $200k up-front, if you're going to be increasing in valuation as fast as a successful venture-funded startup.
Reducing risk also needs to be part of the psychological model; sometimes it is worth spending 5% to get to a milestone with less risk, because owning 10% of a $50mm exit is a lot more valuable than 15% of $10mm.
The biggest trick I've found with startups is to just delay and defer anything not on the path; it's a lot easier to say "we'll buy a nicer couch later" vs. "no, a nice couch isn't a reasonable thing to spend money on". The other thing is to find people with a much better time value of money than you, and use their money to pay for things -- landlords doing upgrades for you (cash upfront) in exchange for higher rent, deferring getting an office entirely, etc. Basically, converting potential capex into opex.